Automatic Finding Trapezoidal Membership Functions in Mining Fuzzy Association Rules Based on Learning Automata

Association rule mining is an important data mining technique used for discovering relationships among all data items. Membership functions have a significant impact on the outcome of the mining association rules. An important challenge in fuzzy association rule mining is finding an appropriate membership functions, which is an optimization issue. In the most relevant studies of fuzzy association rule mining, only triangle membership functions are considered. This study, as the first attempt, used a team of continuous action-set learning automata (CALA) to find both the appropriate number and positions of trapezoidal membership functions (TMFs). The spreads and centers of the TMFs were taken into account as parameters for the research space and a new approach for the establishment of a CALA team to optimize these parameters was introduced. Additionally, to increase the convergence speed of the proposed approach and remove bad shapes of membership functions, a new heuristic approach has been proposed. Experiments on two real data sets showed that the proposed algorithm improves the efficiency of the extracted rules by finding optimized membership functions

A multi-tier adaptive grid algorithm for the evolutionary multi-objective optimisation of complex problems

The multi-tier Covariance Matrix Adaptation Pareto Archived Evolution Strategy (m-CMA-PAES) is an evolutionary multi-objective optimisation (EMO) algorithm for real-valued optimisation problems. It combines a non-elitist adaptive grid based selection scheme with the efficient strategy parameter adaptation of the elitist Covariance Matrix Adaptation Evolution Strategy (CMA-ES). In the original CMA-PAES, a solution is selected as a parent for the next population using an elitist adaptive grid archiving (AGA) scheme derived from the Pareto Archived Evolution Strategy (PAES). In contrast, a multi-tiered AGA scheme to populate the archive using an adaptive grid for each level of non-dominated solutions in the considered candidate population is proposed. The new selection scheme improves the performance of the CMA-PAES as shown using benchmark functions from the ZDT, CEC09, and DTLZ test suite in a comparison against the (μ+λ) μ λ Multi-Objective Covariance Matrix Adaptation Evolution Strategy (MO-CMA-ES). In comparison with MO-CMA-ES, the experimental results show that the proposed algorithm offers up to a 69 % performance increase according to the Inverse Generational Distance (IGD) metric

Improving cluster recovery with feature rescaling factors

The data preprocessing stage is crucial in clustering. Features may describe entities using different scales. To rectify this, one usually applies feature normalisation aiming at rescaling features so that none of them overpowers the others in the objective function of the selected clustering algorithm. In this paper, we argue that the rescaling procedure should not treat all features identically. Instead, it should favour the features that are more meaningful for clustering. With this in mind, we introduce a feature rescaling method that takes into account the within-cluster degree of relevance of each feature. Our comprehensive simulation study, carried out on real and synthetic data, with and without noise features, clearly demonstrates that clustering methods that use the proposed data normalization strategy clearly outperform those that use traditional data normalization

Clustering Algorithms: Their Application to Gene Expression Data

Gene expression data hide vital information required to understand the biological process that takes place in a particular organism in relation to its environment. Deciphering the hidden patterns in gene expression data proffers a prodigious preference to strengthen the understanding of functional genomics. The complexity of biological networks and the volume of genes present increase the challenges of comprehending and interpretation of the resulting mass of data, which consists of millions of measurements; these data also inhibit vagueness, imprecision, and noise. Therefore, the use of clustering techniques is a first step toward addressing these challenges, which is essential in the data mining process to reveal natural structures and iden-tify interesting patterns in the underlying data. The clustering of gene expression data has been proven to be useful in making known the natural structure inherent in gene expression data, understanding gene functions, cellular processes, and subtypes of cells, mining useful information from noisy data, and understanding gene regulation. The other benefit of clustering gene expression data is the identification of homology, which is very important in vaccine design. This review examines the various clustering algorithms applicable to the gene expression data in order to discover and provide useful knowledge of the appropriate clustering technique that will guarantee stability and high degree of accuracy in its analysis procedure